Tracing the shifting fortunes and changing character of New York City's economic elite over half a century, Becker examines a chapter in the social history of the United States--the rise of the American bourgeoisie. Illustrations.

Introduction; Part I. Manners, Fortunes, Politics: 1. Accumulating capital; 2. Negotiating the New Metropolis; 3. The politics of capital; Part II. Reluctant Revolutionaries: 4. Bourgeois New Yorkers go to war; 5. The spoils of victory; 6. Reconstructing New York; Part III: 7. Democracy in the Age of Capital; 8. A Bourgeois world; 9. The rights of labor, the rights of property; 10. The power of capital and the crisis of legitimacy; Epilogue.